“That is nonsense,” Sara began. “You are being overly…” But he held her gaze and slowly stroked her hand over the entire hard, thick length of him.
“I’ll sleep in the stables,” he threatened. “I’ll sleep in the Solent rather than hurt you, Sara. You can’t undermine my control on this, not this time.”
She frowned, maybe sensing there was a compliment, a reason to be pleased in his words, and then he saw her put it together: she could drive him beyond reason were she too enthusiastic. Her, Sara Hunt, retiring, rusticating, widowed housekeeper.
“I will abide by your direction,” she said gently. “No matter what, Beck. You can trust me on this, for this once at least.”
He kissed her to hide his relief. In bed at least, he’d never disappointed a woman. And he really would sleep in the stables before he’d start now. Carefully, he shifted over her and settled between her legs.
Sara’s hands came to rest low on his back. “What do you want me to do?”
“You can kiss and pet and carry on all you want above the waist.” Beck nuzzled her throat. “Below the waist, you don’t move unless I tell you to. Not a wiggle or a tease, Sara.”
“Below the waist, I am your statue. I will come to life only at your command.”
For several minutes, he tried to content himself with easy kisses.
“I like kissing you.” Sara brushed his hair back and levered up to capture his mouth again. “Like it a lot.”
As did he, but Beck’s concentration was fixed on the territory Sara had given into his exclusive control. As she settled into the kissing and let her hands roam over his back, Beck gradually eased himself more snugly against her sex. The urge to thrust—to push into her and keep pushing—was nearly overwhelming, but he contented himself with nudging, then nudging again.
“This is harder than I thought it would be, this holding still,” Sara said against his neck. He angled up on his arms to regard her.
“Is it too difficult?” Let alone hard.
“No.” Sara smiled slightly. “But what is the problem? I want you inside me, Beckman.”
“This is the problem.” He did flex his hips then, and by rights—she’d had a child, for pity’s sake—he should have begun to slip into the sweet, wet heat of her.
Sara cocked her head on the pillow. “It doesn’t hurt. Do that again.”
He did, watching her face closely, waiting for the telltale wince.
“Again.”
He gained a bit of entry but saw her expression change fleetingly. “I’m hurting you.”
“No. It’s just different, that’s all. Again.”
He complied, hamstrung between increasing arousal and the certain conviction—as closely as her body wrapped him—he had to be hurting her. She wasn’t hurting him, though; God above, just the bloody opposite.
“Don’t stop, Beck,” Sara said, but he could hear the caution in her tone as the head of his cock was now lodged blissfully inside her.
He tried to think.
“Close yourself around me,” he suggested, settling down on his forearms.
Sara hugged him to her more tightly.
“Inside, too, Sara. Here.” He gave her a minute thrust to demonstrate.
“Close myself?”
“Grip my cock with your sex. Like you don’t want me to pull out.” She comprehended that, and Beck felt the snugness of her contract around him. Had he been a Papist, he would have started saying the rosary on behalf of his disintegrating wits.
“Do that again, slowly, as if you could pull me into you, then let me go.”
She did it, and he experimentally eased forward as she relaxed.
“That works,” she reported, starting up again.
It worked too bloody well. It worked to arouse him to the point where his entire being was an exercise in self-discipline. By the smallest increments imaginable, Sara’s body eased around him and admitted him to her intimate depths.
“Are you in pain?” Sara’s hands were anchored on his buttocks, her face tucked against his chest.
“Bliss,” he managed. But as soon as he let go, the bliss would implode into ecstasy. He couldn’t do that until he was sure he wouldn’t hurt her. “Can you move just a little on me now?”
“Like this?” She rolled her hips conservatively.
“Just like that,” Beck rasped. “Until you’re comfortable.”
Or until he died, because all this holding back would surely kill him.
“I’m comfortable.” She set up a tidy little rocking. “I just…”
“What, love?” Beck dropped his forehead to hers. “Tell me. Please.”
“I want more.” Sara let go with a luxurious undulation and sighed against his neck.
Sainthood loomed within Beck’s grasp, but he declined for the greater pleasure of making love to the woman in his bed.
“I think we’ve earned a little more,” he said. “But you hold still now. I don’t want to take any chances.”
Immediately, she quieted and waited for him. When he flexed on a long, slow thrust, she moaned softly and melted around him. “Better,” she pronounced.
Thank you, God.
Beck found a rhythm, keeping his movements slow and languid but not letting himself open his eyes, not when the sound of Sara’s sighs alone was driving him beyond reason.
“I want to move, Beck.” Sara took his earlobe in her mouth and gently nipped him. “Just a little.” He nodded. His jaw was clenched too tightly for speech.
Sara didn’t warn him, though, that she was going to wrap her legs around him, lock her ankles at the small of his back, and use her considerable leg strength to anchor him to her. She added “just a little” movement to that shift in position, and Beck was lost.
His thrusting picked up depth and speed, and his arms locked behind Sara’s head.
“Don’t let me hurt…” He felt Sara’s fingers lace with his own, grounding him.
“Love me, Beckman.” She turned her head to kiss the heel of his hand. “Let go. It will be all right.”
She clasped him with the interior muscles he’d shown her earlier, and Beckman was undone, dissolved in pleasure and passion when he felt Sara’s body coming apart with him.
His restraint abandoned him as Sara’s body communicated its delight, gripping and pulling at him, proving to him graphically that his satisfaction was her own.
When he could not have sustained any greater experience of fulfillment, Beck hung over Sara on his forearms, stroking her hair as he pulled the breath back into his body by force of will.
God help him…
“Did I hurt…?”
Sara’s fingers brushed over his mouth then trailed around the back of his head to urge him down against her shoulder. While he waited, panting, for his wits to reassemble, she shifted her hips slowly, maybe treating herself to a little more pleasure, and surely answering Beck’s question the most convincing way possible.
“That’s all right then,” Beck said, realizing it might be a little afterthought of an orgasm making her quiver around him like that, not just erotic sensitivity. “You’re all right.”
She kissed his throat and cuddled into him.
He lifted up a little—the woman needed to breathe—but Sara’s fingers tightened in his hair, and so he lingered. He kissed her eyes and her cheek and her mouth, suckled her earlobe, and nuzzled her eyebrows. He closed his eyes and listened to her breathing, then buried his face in the fragrant cloud of her hair.
He could stay there, in that bed, feasting his senses on her forever. His cock was softening, but still Sara’s body held him gently, and he knew the temptation to start up again, to ease from the bliss of fulfillment to the bliss of anticipation, again and again.
She would not thank him, though. Not tomorrow, maybe not even the day after.
“I’ll be right back,” Beck said, kissing her mouth one last time. Carefully, he uncoupled from her body then crossed the room to retrieve the wash water. He tend
ed to himself, his cock still sensitive, then wrung out the cloth and sat on the bed at Sara’s hip.
“Covers back.”
Sara complied, barely, so Beck had to reach beneath the covers to hold the cool cloth gently against her sex. “Now, I wish we had a chandelier hanging over the bed.”
“You want to peek?”
“I want to memorize the glory of you,” Beck said. “And I want to make sure you’re not… sore.”
“Stop worrying.” Sara’s smile in the moonlight was radiant. “I am not sore, and I will not be sore, and so far, I like this dallying business rather a lot.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” Beck turned the cloth over, giving her the cooler side. “I did not want to spend our remaining nights here playing cards.”
Or drinking. The thought slipped past his postcoital glow, puzzling him, for all it was the truth.
“You’re frowning. We can play cards if you insist.”
“It isn’t that.” Beck returned the cloth to the basin and climbed in beside her. “Budge up.”
“As we’re truly good friends now, I suppose?”
He arranged her straddling him, and bless the woman, she snuggled right down against his body.
“We’re friends, at least,” Beck said, wrapping his arms around her. He wasn’t a man who begrudged his partners affection, but neither in the usual course was he exactly interested in lingering in a woman’s bed. Still, he didn’t question the pleasure he took in Sara’s willingness to fall asleep in his arms. Didn’t deny he enjoyed stroking that glorious hair down her back long after dreams had claimed her.
He did, however, wonder why he felt as if, for the first time in his life, he’d unwrapped a lovely package, chosen and decorated just for him, and had been utterly delighted with his present.
Incongruous as it was, he felt as if he’d made love to an innocent—not that he had any experience to go by there—to a woman who’d waited just for him, and saved all her passion and regard just for him.
Which, considering Sara was a mother well past the first blush of youth, made no sense at all.
Twelve
The weekend flew by, with Saturday spent in an exhausting marathon of shopping and Sunday spent largely recovering. Sara saw firsthand that Beck excelled at anything associated with commercial endeavor. Whatever they purchased, he had it sent to the inn and packed on their wagon so there would be no delay Monday morning loading and rearranging the wagon’s contents.
The way he spent money was to Sara nigh virtuosic. He didn’t waste it, though, he spent it, invested it. He bought the better quality product, assuring her more durable goods were the better bargain, even if they cost a little more.
She agreed and raised her sights accordingly.
For North, Beck dropped off measurements taken from the man’s boots at a little hole-in-the-corner establishment on a side street.
He purchased bolts of cloth for dresses, drapes, and everything in between, then moved on to sheets, towels, table linens, and other household goods. Sara noticed many of the merchants knew him, though a few made mention of not having seen him in some time.
“You are good company.” He passed her a tot of cognac at the end of their busy day and joined her with his own on the balcony. “It’s rare I can go shopping with a female and not end up wanting to run howling to the nearest taproom.”
“It’s rare I can go shopping with a man and not want to shoo him howling to the nearest taproom. With you, though, it isn’t shopping so much as provisioning, and in the quantities you were buying today, you had the attention of the merchants.”
“True, and with a pretty lady on my arm helping me make my choices.”
A pretty lady the clerks kept referring to as his wife. He’d let them—and so had Sara.
They sipped their drinks in silence, standing side by side on the moonlit balcony.
“When, exactly, do your menses next befall you?”
A day ago, Sara might have taken exception to such a question, but now, it struck her as a simple measure of their intimacy.
She thought a moment, then named a date. “Why?”
“We’re taking precautions to minimize the risk of conception.” Beck set his drink down without finishing it. “Timing is important.”
She trusted him to understand the details of that timing at least as well as she did. He was canny that way, and had she not known differently, she would have thought him married for far longer than the few months he alluded to.
“Will you tell me of your marriage, Beck?”
“What do you want to know?” His voice was even, but in his posture, Sara detected the slightest bracing.
“Who was she? How did she die, and do you still miss her?” Did you love her to distraction, and is she the reason you look so sad sometimes?
He was silent for a moment, as if arranging answers from least to most painful. “Her name was Devona Brockwood, and her grandfather was the Marquess of Whitfield, her papa in line for the title. When her papa died, she fell under the guardianship of her uncle, and he had several daughters close to Devona’s age. It was decided she would be married off posthaste, because she’d already had a Season.”
“Posthaste?” Sara didn’t like the sound of that.
“I was considered an adequate match. Her stock had fallen with her father’s death—her father had not seen to her settlements prior to his demise—and my sense was she was grateful for my attentions. Had her father lived, I’ve no doubt a duke’s son or the son of a marquess, at least, would have been required.”
And Sara had to ask. “Was she pretty?”
“Very.”
Damn him for his honesty, though she thanked him for it too. “But?”
Beck’s smile was sad. “But I was not yet one and twenty. All I knew was that by the rules of any society, once I married her, I could swive her regularly, sport about Town with her on my arm, and be the envy of my friends from university. She was eager enough for the match, and I was anxious to provide my father and brother an heir. We married on less than three months’ acquaintance.”
“Many marriages start out with less,” Sara said gently, because Beck’s disgust was evident in his voice.
“They do, but her death was a blessing in a way—to her, if no one else. She loved another, and there was no means by which we could have been happy.”
Ah, God. The oldest recipe for misery on the planet, and the one seeing the greatest circulation. “And you did not know this when you married her?”
“Of course not. I knew I was to become an instant adult, by virtue of having captured my bride. I’d come into an inheritance at twenty, finished university, and was hell-bent on proving to my father I was more worthy of his respect than Nicholas. A bride with a baby in her arms was to be my capstone achievement—provided, of course, the baby was a boy.”
“You were young.”
“I was an arrogant idiot,” Beck countered, “which is precisely why I never discuss my marriage, much less think of it if I can help it.”
Even though, years later, it still fueled his flight into the opium dens of Paris?
“I’m sorry your marriage wasn’t happy.” Sara curled her arm through his and rested her cheek against his bicep. “We’re so easily hurt when we’re young. We dress and talk and carry on like adults, but inside, we’re not very adult at all.”
Beck settled his arm across her shoulders. “And yet by the time you were twenty, you had a small child, had toured much of Europe, and were the support of your family.”
“I was impersonating an adult. There was no one else on hand for the role. Take me to bed, Beckman. We’re both weary, and this talk is not cheering.”
She hurt for him but knew not how to say so without offending his male pride. Or perhaps she wanted the confidences to cease flowing between them, lest she impart a few more of her own.
* * *
Devona had been so pretty, like a perfect caricature of English beauty. Blond, willow
y, soft-spoken, and gracious. She’d been every young gentleman’s dream of the ideal wife. But never, in several months of marriage, had she said those words, “Take me to bed, Beckman.”
Such a realization might have engendered rage in years past, or guilt—barges and buckets of guilt—or resentment. Tonight, Beck felt only gratitude for Sara’s company, and sadness for a young couple whose union had been doomed by immaturity.
Beck undressed his lover with simple courtesy, and after he’d brushed out Sara’s hair, he rebraided it, but only after he’d indulged his pleasure in its unbound state. When they shed their nightclothes and climbed onto the bed, Sara tucked herself against Beck’s larger frame and hiked a leg across his thighs.
“Did you enjoy today?” she asked, flipping her braid over her shoulder. She settled against him as his arms went around her, then found a comfy spot for her head against his shoulder.
She fits me, Beck thought, resting his cheek against her hair. She not only fit him, she was easily affectionate with him, at least behind closed doors. Maybe this was a maternal quality, this simple affection, or maybe it was a Sara quality. In either case, it was one of the things he enjoyed about her most, the way she gave and accepted affection.
“I enjoyed being with you today,” Beck said. “But no, haring all over town, haggling, it reminded me too much of my past, and that in truth, Three Springs should not be my concern.”
“But your father is your concern, and this is how you can feel close to him as he slips away.”
“Plain speaking, but accurate. Nita writes that he sleeps a great deal.”
“So he’s not in pain.” She shifted up on the pillows and tugged on Beck’s broad shoulders. “Cuddle up, Haddonfield, as we’re great friends and all.”
A little tentatively, he did as she bid, resting his cheek on the slope of her breast. She linked her arms around him and hugged him to her.
“Tell me about your papa,” she said, threading her fingers through the hair at his nape.
Slowly at first, Beck did. He started out with expected propaganda, reporting all of the earl’s most impressive accomplishments, the bills he’d seen enacted in Parliament, the sound advice he’d given the king or the regent. From there, Beck drifted closer to more personal recollections, until, an hour later, he was wondering aloud why his father had waited until death was knocking at his door to hold Nick accountable for securing the succession and marrying.
Beckman: Lord of Sins ll-4 Page 19
